


Flowers in his hair (Magic secrets in his eyes)

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Banter, Humor, M/M, a sprinkle of crack maybe, inspired by h50 3.12, poor steve is very confused
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-28
Updated: 2020-02-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:35:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22933405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: “What you don’t know,” Danny says, ominously, “is that there was another photoshoot around the same time. One I also did willingly, and it wasn’t for charity. I got paid for it.”“Alright.” Steve laughs a little at the thought. “What are we talking, here? More shirtless pinup pictures that ended up stuck to the fridges of unhappy housewives all over Newark?”Danny shakes his head. “Way worse.”Or: In which Danny has a deep, dark secret he’s been trying to hide from Steve for the last nine years.
Relationships: Steve McGarrett/Danny "Danno" Williams
Comments: 43
Kudos: 370





	Flowers in his hair (Magic secrets in his eyes)

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote most of this while I was sitting at home with a cold a while back, but I had so much fun with this one, omg. Contains minor spoilers for 3.12, in which Danny’s nephew Eric emails a certain picture of Danny to everyone in Danny’s contact list. Note that while this definitely has a T rating, it does probably lean a little more towards an M than my habitual G that gets bumped up for a single f-bomb. Everybody keeps all of their clothes on, though!
> 
> The title is adapted from a very internet famous quote from novelist Arundhati Roy: “She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes.” I feel almost guilty using something that sounds so wonderfully profound for a fic as comparatively silly as this one, but gosh, it works weirdly well.

When Danny shows up in Steve’s kitchen in the morning for their routine carpool into work, he takes a long, hard, suspicious look at Steve. Steve stares back, confused but unable to articulate this feeling because he’s still chewing on the last bite of a banana, until Danny huffs, flaps a hand and says, “C’mon, finish your buttery coffee atrocity. We’re going to be late.”

They are, so Steve does as ordered and follows Danny outside, into a day that is filled with more of those looks from Danny that remain, as far as Steve is aware, entirely uncalled for. Over lunch he steps into Lou’s office just to ask if Lou has noticed anything off with Danny lately. 

Lou, who is enjoying the break, his carton of fried rice and now Steve’s predicament, is not of any great help. “Hey man, you’re the Danny whisperer,” he says, pointing his chopsticks at Steve.

Which is true. Steve has probably whispered to Danny more than anyone else in the world, and he takes pride in claiming that he understands Danny better, too. None of that magically gives him the answer he’s looking for, and just some strange looks are not enough to confront Danny yet – he could, but he would almost certainly get nowhere and lose his element of surprise – so he decides to keep sitting on this nagging feeling a little longer and maybe bring it up over dinner, if it’s still a problem by then.

His plan never makes it to dinner. Danny ambushes him in his office about an hour before Steve was planning to call it quits for the day and tell everyone to go home, barring any sudden emergency calls. “Did Eric send you any emails with attachments over the last, say, nineteen hours?” Danny demands.

Steve watches in fascination as a person he usually considers pretty sane bustles about closing all the blinds on the windows overlooking the bullpen from Steve’s office, and then those on the door too, for good measure. This promises to be good. “I don’t think so.”

“Text messages?”

“He’s never sent me a text in his life.”

Danny is done concealing them from the world – or the world from them, depending on what happens next – and takes a restless seat on Steve’s office couch. “Snail mail? Smoke signs? Letters attached to the foot of an offensively colorful bird?”

“No, Danny.” Steve still has no clue what’s going on, but this is shaping up to be a personal conversation, not a work one. He leaves his desk chair to round the desk, drag the chair for visitors over to face Danny and sit down in that. “What’s this about?” It might finally be time to bring up the fact that he isn’t blind, too. “You’ve been acting weird all day.”

Danny clasps his hands in a way that kind of looks like he’s wringing them. “Did _I_ send you any of the aforementioned types of messages?”

“No.” The question is continuing an odd pattern, though, and that shakes a memory loose. Eric, emails, emails from Danny’s account that Eric sent. “Is this about your stint as Mr. November in the 1998 Newark Police Academy Charity Calendar?”

There’s a beat of quiet before Danny even bothers to raise an eyebrow. “Wow, you had that at the ready in creepy detail.” He takes a deep breath. “And yes. Kinda. Yesterday, Eric informed me he’d found some more pictures of me. He said he wouldn’t show anyone, but you never know with that boy, and you’d be the obvious first choice.”

Steve likes being first choice, even if it’s maybe about blackmailing Danny. He pushes the feeling of minor victory aside to focus on the actual issue at hand. “But I already know at least one of those pictures exists. Why would you be so cagey about it now if it’s just more of the same?”

Danny waves a finger around in the universal gesture for _you are very wrong, good sir_. “What you don’t know,” he says, ominously, “is that there was another photoshoot around the same time. One I also did willingly, and it wasn’t for charity. I got paid for it.”

“Alright.” Steve laughs a little at the thought. “What are we talking, here? More shirtless pinup pictures that ended up stuck to the fridges of unhappy housewives all over Newark?”

Danny shakes his head. “Way worse.”

For a moment, Steve is unsure how it could possibly be something that Danny would consider worse than that charity calendar. Then his brain helpfully reminds him that in the picture he’s thinking of, Danny was still wearing pants.

“Look,” Danny has meanwhile started saying, in a tone like Steve accused him of something, “I was young and stupid and I needed the quick cash, okay? So don’t you dare judge me for a choice I made back then so I’d be able to at least cover groceries while I was racking up debt to put myself through college.”

Steve feels, unexpectedly, a little offended at the implications. “You think I’d think badly of you over some naked pictures from two decades ago? Sure, I get that it’s embarrassing, but-”

“Oh.” There’s that _wrong wrong wrong_ finger again. Danny cackles without humor. “Oho, my friend, I wish it had just been some nudity. The innocence of that would have been welcome.”

Steve is forced to revise his expectations of what Danny is talking about once again, and there’s really only one way for his imagination to go at this point, which is straight into the nearest available gutter. He sits back, crosses his arms over his chest and tries his very best not to look flustered. “Okay,” he says, more to himself than to Danny. So Danny starred in some mid-nineties pornographic photoshoot. Who hasn’t?

Steve hasn’t, obviously, but there’s a lot of stuff he’s never done that isn’t necessarily bad. He’s never baked a lemon meringue pie, either. Lemon meringue is great.

He tries very hard to stop his brain in its tracks before it conjures up an image of Danny wearing nothing but oven mittens and a cocky expression. It’s not very likely that whoever organized this shoot knew what kind of recurring dreams Danny’s best friend would have twenty years later.

“You wanna see?” Danny asks, and for a moment Steve is pretty sure he can smell the sour-sweetness of lemon meringue.

Then he – finally – regains some common sense and decency. He’s a little surprised at the offer, but either way he can’t just take it. “You don’t have to show me if you don’t want to.”

Danny shifts to retrieve his phone from his pants pocket. “No, I might as well. I’ve already told you enough that I know you’ll go looking for it eventually, and knowing you, you’ll find it, and I’ll only be mad if you do it behind my back.”

Steve would like to say none of that is true and he would never look for something in Danny’s past that Danny doesn’t want him to know, but this is Danny. He can’t just _not_ know something this big about him. It’s shaking Steve’s entire worldview a little right now that there’s apparently still anything at all he hasn’t discovered yet. “That is a good point,” he admits, because Danny deserves that much, at least.

Danny doesn’t even snark back, but just pats the couch next to him. Steve dutifully moves his ass from the visitor’s chair opposite Danny, to the spot where Danny’s hand was a moment ago right next to him. It’s only after he moves that he realizes what Danny is about to reveal and his nerves suddenly spike. Or maybe that’s not nerves, but either way, it certainly involves his heartrate. “You sure?” he asks, to give Danny one last chance to change his mind while he’s still tapping away at his phone.

“You have a right to know,” Danny says, decisively. Steve has just enough time to think that’s a pretty weird thing to say about porn before Danny hands him the phone, a scanned photograph displayed in glorious colorful HD on the screen.

And Danny was right, this _is_ worse.

It’s Danny. In a Hawaiian shirt.

He’s definitely not naked, that’s for sure. He’s wearing shorts and sandals and a pair of snazzy shades on his buzzed head. The shirt is almost fully buttoned, showing not much more cleavage than Danny does currently on any given work day, but oh dear God, it’s a _very_ Hawaiian shirt, no doubt about it. It takes Steve a while and a lot of blinking to make out that the pattern is supposed to be hot air balloons, interspersed with the occasional flower, apparently randomly floating, and a bird or two that doesn’t look like any real animal Steve has ever seen. There’s a lot of orange, purple, and green, and spots of pink in an overwhelming, almost neon shade. Steve wouldn’t have been surprised if Danny would have glowed in the dark, wearing that thing. He feels a little dizzy just looking at the picture.

“Right?” Danny asks, forcefully, like Steve said something and he’s agreeing. Steve is fairly sure he didn’t say any words – they escape him at the moment – but he might have gasped, which would also qualify for this response.

“It’s…” he starts, trying to come up with something, anything, that would encapsulate this picture.

“An atrocity,” Danny offers. “A war crime. Something that honestly should have disqualified me from ever applying for the police academy on grounds of pure insanity, let alone that I will probably be deported from the state the minute anyone working for the Hawaiian government catches wind of this.”

“We work for the Hawaiian government,” Steve points out, weakly.

Danny circles a hand through the air like he has no patience for Steve getting stuck on the obvious. “Which is why I’m putting my life in your hands now. I hope you appreciate this gesture of trust.”

Steve blinks at the picture a little more. Danny in a hot air balloon shirt. He pinches his own thigh, but apparently he’s not dreaming. “It’s not that bad.”

“Excuse me?” Danny asks. He’s gone still and sounds almost offended, but that just makes Steve double down, because he knows he’s not lying.

“You look good.”

Danny taps the side of Steve’s head as if to check it’s not hollow. “Are you okay? Did someone spike your liter bottle of water?”

Steve pushes Danny’s hand away. “Not the shirt, obviously-”

“Obviously,” Danny echoes, sounding a little relieved Steve hasn’t lost his mind quite yet. “Can you believe that that was the thing this was supposed to sell? To city people?”

“But you,” Steve stubbornly insists, still on the last subject. “Do you have a tan?” That’s when Steve’s view expands, and he catches sight of the background. It’s not the beach he would have expected based on not only the shirt, but also the inflatable beach ball near Danny’s sandaled feet. “Wait. Where is this?” 

“It’s supposed to be Jersey, but they couldn’t even do that right.” Danny presses in close so that their shoulders are smushed together. He uses his thumb to point to something dark on the left, the only section of the skyline that’s not populated by skyscrapers. “See this? I’m fairly sure that’s a silhouette of the Golden Gate Bridge.”

“That’s not in Jersey,” Steve says, very distracted by Danny’s warmth all along his side and Danny’s hand casually resting on the small of his back.

“It’s not,” Danny agrees.

Steve glances at Danny and then back at the phone, because looking at Danny is in no way safe at the moment. He’s way too close. “So this is what’s had you acting crankier than normal all day?”

Danny gives Steve’s shoulder a push with his own. “What, were you expecting something else?”

“Let’s not get into that.” Steve tries to hand the phone back to Danny, but Danny doesn’t take it. He narrows his eyes at Steve, and he _is_ looking at Steve from up close, which kind of forces Steve to look back unless he wants to be caught avoiding Danny.

Of course that’s not enough to throw Danny off the scent of something embarrassing. “No, let’s talk. What _did_ you think this was about, Steven? You said something about nude pictures?”

Steve holds Danny’s eyes until he feels like he’s let Danny laugh at him enough for the time being. He drops the phone in Danny’s lap and gets up, giving his watch a meaningful glance. “You know what, I feel like it’s time for coffee.” His brilliantly clever ruse almost works, because he makes it to his own office door, hand on the handle, poised to push it open.

“Hey,” Danny calls. It stops Steve in his tracks, despite his hunch that it would be the far smarter choice to keep running. Danny gets up, takes his time putting his phone away, and wanders over. He ends up a little too close again, this time without the excuse of fixed places on a couch and pointing things out on a small screen. “Did I ever tell you about my college girlfriend who majored in art?”

Steve is not sure how this turned into story time. He’s kind of in a hurry. “I don’t think so. How’s she relevant?”

“She isn’t, really. I just thought you might be interested to know that I still have the studies she did of me when she was practicing her anatomy of the male human body. Hard copy. Eric can’t get at it.”

It takes a long moment of mental buffering for the implications of any of that to sink in.

Danny takes this time to watch Steve’s face, again, and grin at whatever he sees there. “Figure I may as well show you everything,” he continues, tone innocent, but words anything but. “Lay myself bare, as it were.”

Steve has to lick his suddenly dry lips before he can even attempt to answer. It’s funny how a guy he has almost eight inches on can still keep him pinned to the spot like this. “Yeah,” is the best he can come up with on short notice. “Makes sense.” He’s not sure that it does, but he doesn’t really give a shit.

Danny gives a nod, like that’s the confirmation he’d been waiting for. “Tonight, seven, my place. I’ll cook, you bring the wine. If it’s in a can, I’m not opening the door for you.”

They never drink wine together. Both of them prefer beer; Steve remembers at least one conversation about wine being a date drink. This is even less subtle than Danny giving him a time and place to show up. “What is it’s boxed?”

“Try it, if you really want to take your chances.” With those famous last words, Danny pushes the door beneath Steve’s forgotten hand open and slips past him.

Steve is left to contemplate life, photoshoots, and wine-related risks while the door with its closed blinds slowly falls shut in his face. He never does end up getting that coffee, but not long after he buys possibly the nicest bottle of wine he’s ever paid for.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! If you want to hear something that is not a secret, but, by means of this sentence, still revealed in a somewhat dramatic fashion: I really enjoy comments! ❤
> 
> I’m on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 (and mostly McDanno) sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


End file.
